What a butte...

Well not a butte, a beaute! After banding a few hatch year white-crowns, we were fortunate to catch this adult male white-crowned sparrow last week. We don't tend to catch a lot of these birds here at Kiptopeke and this striking male deserved all the attention he got!

These birds are quite hard to confuse with anything else due to their bold head patterns but beware, juveniles have brown, not black head stripes. White-crowns breed in the north, from Alaska into the northern Canadian provinces and south along the western coast, just dipping into Montana and Idaho. Two western races are year round but we get to see these guys throughout most of the winter here in the East. Interestingly, Alaskan white-crowned sparrows migrate over 2500 miles to their winter grounds and one migrating bird that was tracked moved over 300 miles in one night! White-crowned sparrows are a heavily studied species, check out tons of cool facts on allaboutbirds.org for more info!